Smart Mobs, Swarms, and Flash Crowds

PizzaFace writes "Personal communication devices always allowed people to communicate easily and to coordinate their plans at the spur of the moment. As PCDs became widespread, they allowed their owners to converge rapidly in large groups, for purposes social or political. Now something else is happening. Ubiquitous PCDs give each owner multiple simultaneous opportunities for communication or convergence. People surf their PCD network from one conversation to another, and physically surf the most promising of the gatherings to which the network invites them. Their web of social contacts is as broad as the globe and as shallow as a cell phone's keystroke. What happens when people become nodes on a network? Joel Garreau reports provocatively in the Washington Post. His sample is skewed by Washington's summer influx of interns, who come from around the country to work for little or no pay in part because they're chasing 'peak experiences,' and who have lots of disposable time and energy, no local roots or tethers, and an unusually large network of like-wired acquaintances." I think the conventional (and most descriptive) term for this behavior is flash crowd.

Comments

The insects are all that is left

[milo_Gwalthny]

It has happened. We have become ants.

New Oxymoron!

[bons]

"Smart Mob"
News for Linguists. Stuff to banter.

Flash Crowd != Smart Mob. FC ~= Slashdot Effect

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Flash Crowd == Slashdot Effect.

Yep. The "Slashdot Effect" is the subset of Slashdot user behavior that cooresponds to a virtual flash crowd: Everybody "teleports" to the site of the news event.

But a "Smart Mob" is much different from a "Flash Crowd".

With a "Flash Crowd" hi-tek communication only enables the initial gathering. Once the mob forms they have the same characteristics as a pre-tech mob: Interpersonal communication is minimal, and the "mob organism" exhibits the collective intelligence of an ant army, far lower than that of a committee.

A "Smart Mob", on the other hand, has instant communication between separated members (and people not present). This enables large-scale organized behavior, cohesive action, regrouping, healing of "wounds", etc.

A Smart Mob has the same relation to a Flash Crowd as the "Permanent Floating Riot Club" did in the Niven short story. Though usually less hostile and sociopathic. B-)

Note that this is another example of human self-organizing behavior. Organizing people is never a problem - they do it spontaneously. Keeping them from organizing to do something undesirable, or doing something undesirable once organized, often is. (Which is why the US Constitution is primarily composed of rules limiting and channeling the government's power.)